Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/325

 1847 Ruskin was invited by Lockhart to review Lord Lindsay's 'History of Christian Art' for the 'Quarterly' (June 1847). He did so, he says, for the sake of Lockhart's daughter, for whose hand he was a suitor, but he was doomed to a second disappointment in love, followed like his first by a breakdown in his health. His parents presently urged him to propose to the daughter of old friends of theirs. Euphemia ('Erne') Chalmers Gray was the eldest daughter of Mr. George Gray, a lawyer, of Bowerswell, Perth. She used to visit the Ruskins at Herne Hill ; and it was for her, in answer to a challenge, that he wrote in 1841, at a couple of sittings, one of the most popular of his minor books, 'The King of the Golden River.' She had grown up into a great beauty, and her family, no less than Ruskin's parents, were anxious for the match. On 10 April 1848 they were married at Perth. He was about ten years her senior, and much more so in habits of life and thought. The honeymoon was cut short by the bridegroom's ill-health. After a continental tour later in the year, they settled in London at 31 Park Street. Ruskin was by this time one of the literary celebrities of the day, and had many friends and acquaintances in the literary and artistic world. Among these were Mr. G. F. Watts, the Brownings, Miss Jean Ingelow, Carlyle, Froude, and Miss Mitford, whose closing years he brightened with many delicate and generous kindnesses. Ruskin's wife was presented at court, and occasionally he took her to evening crushes. But he could not live long, he said, with a dead brick wall opposite his window, and London life interfered with the literary works in which he was absorbed. He retreated, therefore, with his wife to a house on Herne Hill, and afterwards to his parents at Denmark Hill. The winters of 1849-50 and of 1851-2 the Ruskins spent at Venice he hard at work on measuring and sketching and reading, and only occasionally finding inclination for social distractions. 'I broke through my vows of retirement the other day,' he wrote to Mr. Fawkes of Farnley (Nineteenth Century, April 1900) 'to take Effie to one of Marshal Radetsky's balls at Verona. The Austrians have made such a pet of her that she declares if she ever leaves Venice it must be to go to Vienna.' In the summer of 1851 Ruskin had made the acquaintance of Millais. ' I have dined and taken breakfast with Ruskin,' writes the painter (2 July), 'and we are such good friends that he wishes me to accompany him to Switzerland this summer.' Millais's great picture of 1853 was the 'Order of Release' (now in the Tate Gallery); the figure of the woman was painted from Mrs. Ruskin. In that summer the Ruskins had taken a cottage at Glenfinlas. Millais and his brother William accompanied them, and stayed for some weeks at the neighbouring inn. Sir Henry Acland was also for a time of the party. The events of this tour are described in the 'Life of Millais' (vol. i. chap, v.), where several sketches of Mrs. Ruskin by the artist are given. 'We have immense enjoyment,' he wrote to a friend, 'painting out on the rocks, and having our dinner brought to us there, and in the evening climbing up the steep mountains for exercise, Mrs. Ruskin accompanying us.' Millais's portrait of Ruskin (No. 3 below) was done at this time. Ruskin was writing the 'Lectures on Architecture and Painting,' which he delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 and published as a book in the following year. Millais drew the frontispiece, and Ruskin took occasion to allude in terms of high praise to the work of him and other pre-Raphaelites. Shortly afterwards a nullity suit was instituted by Mrs. Ruskin. The case was undefended by Ruskin; the marriage was annulled, and on 3 July 1855 Millais was married at Bowerswell to Euphemia Chalmers Gray.

The years of Ruskin's married life were a period of great literary activity. Soon after the second volume of 'Modern Painters' had appeared, Turner was seized by illness, and his works began to show a conclusive failure of power. Ruskin felt free to pursue the completion of his task without the pressure under which he had at first placed himself, and proceeded to collect at large and at leisure materials for an elaborate examination of the canons of art. This led him far afield into various lines of work. He spent the autumn of 1848, after a tour to Amiens and Normandy, in writing 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture.' This was an attempt to apply to architecture some of the principles he had sought to enforce in the case of painting. The Seven Lamps were sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, and obedience ; and the final test of the excellence of a work of architecture was to be the spirit of which it was an expression. The book is narrow in its religious outlook, and in later years its author denounced its 'wretched rant.' But it contains some of Ruskin's finest passages, and it had considerable influence in encouraging the Gothic revival of the time. The interest taken by Ruskin a few years later in the architecture of the Oxford